Ireland day 6 - Friday 10th June

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Day 6 – Friday 10th June

We moved on again today, heading south along the west coast through Co. Donegal. Susan took the wheel, and we passed peat bogs, with piles of peat turfs drying. Unfortunately, the weather was grey and damp like so many days in Ireland, so I’m not sure how dry they would have been.

After a while, the satnav took us down a narrow, windy road, which turned out to be very different from the roads in Canada, and Susan decided I was going to do some driving. Having been brought up driving around similar roads in the English countryside I managed OK.

We both commented on how tidy and clean the majority of houses we passed looked, with spotless paintwork, newly mown lawns and no visible detritus lying around. The roads however had more potholes and cracks than we had seen to this point.

We followed the windy roads around the edges of loughs taking a slight detour to visit Mountcharles pier which had Atlantic waves battering the shore. Across the road there was a café with a petting zoo, and we spent a few minutes chatting to chickens, baby chickens, pigs, lamas, alpacas, goats, rabbits, peahens and a peacock.

We arrived in Donegal. What a lovely historic town it is! Having had a bit of a wander, we visited the parish church and Donegal Castle before grabbing some shopping from the local Spar and heading back to Sherri at around 13:30.

We planned to get to Sligo in the next hour or so, but we had a few spontaneous detours. We saw a sign for a blue flag beach and thought we’d have lunch there. Murvagh beach was beautiful, with more crashing waves, but it was very windy, so we ate in Sherri with the Best of the Dubliners playing. That Luke Kelly does get about!

We then spotted a castle silhouetted on a hill and headed towards it to find that it wasn’t a ruin as we’d first though, but a private residence on the Mullaghmore Head, and there were locked gated preventing us getting as near as we’d have like to. There were however more crashing Atlantic waves to watch, so we took some time to do so.

As we were driving back to the main road, Susan did some online research and discovered that the castle used to be owned by Lord Mountbatten before he was assassinated by the IRA. It’s called Classiebawn Castle and is now owned by the estate of Hugh Tunney. Caroline Devine has a lifetime exclusive right of residence, granted to her by Tulley before his death in 2011. Lucky Ms Devine!

We’d agreed earlier that some fresh fish would be lovely for dinner, and were lucky enough to see a van by the roadside selling just that! Some scallops and seabass in the bag, we carried on.

We were about 15 minutes from Sligo when we took our next detour to see the massive and breathtaking cliff face of Benbulin. As we drove along another narrow single track road, Sherri decided that the pressure in one of her tyres had reduced. We stopped to check, but none of them seemed particularly flat, so we carried on.

We spotted a sign to the Glencar Waterfall, so of course had to visit it! We passed another waterfall on the way, and saw the water being blown back up over the edge of the drop! We didn’t find out until I was writing this blog that it’s the highest waterfall in Ireland at 150m and in English is called the Devil’s Chimney. Glencar Waterfall is only 15m high, but it was rather pretty and alongside a lovely lake. I didn’t swim, but really want to soon!

Finally, we reached Sligo, which was rather underwhelming. We visited a church which had a locked door, wandered down to the river, found some hair grips for Susan in Claires and then popped into the local Tesco for some accompaniments to the scallops. There was a statue of WB Yeats, so there wasn’t a compete dearth of culture. However, we didn’t hang about.

We managed to find a service station with some air, and checked the tyre pressures. One tyre was slightly less than the others, so we topped it up and reset the pressure gauge. Fingers crossed that’s the end of that. Surprisingly there were washing machines available at the service station taking up to 18kg of washing! A car pulled up, two women got out, loaded a machine, turned it on and drove away in a BMW. Odd.

Finally we arrived at Petie’s Cottage in the village of Cloonloo. It’s utterly charming, warm and comfortable. We were greeted by the host, Breege, and found some delicious homemade wheaten bread waiting for us on the kitchen table. Wonderful!

Our journey today took us into 4 counties - Donegal, Leitrim, Ross Common and Sligo!

Our dinner was pea puree, scallops, bacon bits and some smashed Irish baby potatoes. Yummy!

Today was about 11000 steps and 8km.

I’m very excited about tomorrow!

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